A Dark Truth

by Jeff Ross

  A Dark Truth

  * * *

  Jeff Ross

  orca soundings

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2016 Jeff Ross

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ross, Jeff, 1973–, author

  A dark truth / Jeff Ross.

  (Orca soundings)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1327-4 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1328-1 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1329-8 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings

  PS8635.O6928D37 2016 jC813'.6 C2016-900782-0

  C2016-900783-9

  First published in the United States, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931892

  Summary: In this high-interest novel for teens, Riley learns that the color of your skin does affect how you are treated.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover image by iStock.com

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  19 18 17 16 • 4 3 2 1

  For Luca & Alex, who got me back into skateboarding, the SMC for enabling and encouraging, and Megan for tolerating this madness.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter One

  “You have to think about where your shoulders are all the time,” Dashawn said. The sun was right above us, glaring straight down, hot and bright. We were two blocks from the skate park and I was already beginning to sweat. I could feel my underwear binding to my skin. The cascade of water building beneath the brim of my hat.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, if you know, Riley, then start doing it.”

  “Shut up,” I replied. We bumped into one another, arm against arm, then kept moving. Dashawn and I had been best friends since kindergarten. Our mothers used to take us to the same playground to roll around in the sand, but the second they were distracted, we’d be up the play structure and dangling from one of the high bars, laughing our asses off. Four years old and already we required the world to be filled with adventure or boredom settled in.

  It was the same need for an adrenaline boost that had us skateboarding when we were ten. We’d tried other things, like or jumping off cliffs into the deep waters of the bay, but those things didn’t require the same skill. At least, not the way we were doing them. Skateboarding gave us something different, something we could get better at every day but which, at any time, we could totally ruin ourselves doing.

  We bumped into one another again as we turned the corner to the park.

  “Ah, shit,” Dashawn said. “That is a lot of scooter kids.” I exhaled slowly. There had to be twenty of them in there. The youngest ones were on those little three-wheeled scooters. The older ones were fourteen or fifteen and were trying to whip the scooters around above their heads after they popped out of the bowl. Everything about scooters depressed me. The handlebars. The whistling noise they made. And the fact that they were in the skate park at all. I mean, they’re called skate parks for a reason. Anywhere skaters go, we get bothered by security guards or, even worse, the police. No one else has this issue. These kids could ride in the middle of a parking lot and people would think they’re cute. There was no reason for them to be here at all. And the worst of it was they didn’t understand skate-park etiquette. They’d do circles for twenty minutes in the middle of the space, making it impossible for anyone to set up for a trick or create a line.

  “Man,” I said. “There’s even some of those strider bikes in there.”

  “That dude’s on a mountain bike.” Dashawn dropped his board, then popped it back into his hand. This was what he did when he was anxious.

  “It is going to be impossible to hit that ledge,” I said.

  “You give up too easy, bro.” He dropped his board again and rolled forward. I did the same, coming up close to him. “The space is there—you just have to make it or take it.”

  “Make it or take it,” I said. “All right. Or we could just crash one of them.”

  “They’re little kids, man,” Dashawn said. “You’re gonna go running over little kids?”

  I’d had a hate-on for scooter kids since one of them had cut me off at the last second and I’d seriously sprained my ankle. It had put me out for two weeks. That doesn’t sound like much, but it took me another two weeks to get back to where I was actually progressing. I spent that time playing Skate 3 on my Xbox or watching videos online and just dying to get back out again, and all I could see was this little kid on a bright-blue scooter with a stupid grin on his face as he slowly turned into me.

  I knew I shouldn’t hate all scooter kids because of that one, but it was hard. It didn’t seem like any of them really looked out for anyone but themselves. The skate park was nothing more than a place for them to go mess around, whereas kids like Dashawn and me were there to make skateboarding a career.

  “Yeah yeah. They’re erratic pylons,” I said.

  “You gotta be kind, bro,” Dashawn said. He ollied the curb and rolled into the park. One of the scooter kids wove around him, then cut back down a ramp without a care in the world.

  “There’s your ledge,” Dashawn said. He rolled to the ledge and ollied on, then immediately off.

  We were there that day to shoot some clips for our Sponsor Me videos. A lot of people had gone straight to Instagram in an attempt to be seen, but Dashawn and I were old school. We wanted something that you could actually hand out.

  The ledge was fairly high. I had an idea for a trick on it, one I totally thought I could get and which would look kick-ass filmed. I needed to practice, though, before anyone filmed me.

  I popped an ollie, then rolled around the space, going through my trick list. Shove-it, heelflip, kickflip, hardflip, 180, 360. I did this every time I got to the park. If I could get all those tricks in a row, I knew I was ready to hit something bigger.

  By the time I was done, I was wiping sweat from my eyes and breathing heavily.

  Dashawn rolled over to me, then dropped his right foot to come to a stop. “I’m going to mess around on the bank,” he said.

  “I’m getting this ledge.”

  Dashawn beamed his giant smile at me. “Yeah, you are.” He put his fist out before him, and I gave it a bump. “Keep it smooth.”

  Smooth, I thought as he rolled away. That was Dashawn. Everything he did had a flow to it. Even when he fell, it was with a certain kind of grace.

  There were some scooter kids near the end of the ledge. I decided I’d hit it once, just do a 5-0 and pop off, then turn and come right back up to give them the chance to get an idea of the space I was about
to take.

  Dashawn was on the other side of the park, fist-bumping the only other black skater in the park. He turned just as I was about to push and yelled, “That ledge is yours, bro. Crush it.”

  I squinted into the sun, waited for a scooter kid to roll away and pushed hard.

  Chapter Two

  I decided to try the 5-0 without the kickflip first. A 5-0 is like a manual, only on a ledge, so you have to land with the front of your board in the air and lock into whatever you’re sliding on with your back trucks. It’s difficult to land this way after doing a kickflip because you have to quickly spot where you need to lock in and then keep the board perfectly balanced beneath you.

  I failed the first five attempts. The first four, I just spun off and jumped to the ground. But on the final one I did a full-out Superman onto the concrete and slid a good six feet on my elbows. My head almost cracked against the ground, and I left a wet spot from the massive amount of sweat my shirt was holding. A scooter kid rolled over and asked me if I was all right. I slowly got up, ignoring him.

  “Bro, that was a slam,” Dashawn said, sliding to a stop beside me. “You aight?”

  “That wasn’t even with the kickflip,” I said. I tested my body to make certain nothing ached in a broken way. Cuts and bruises I could deal with. Hell, adrenaline did a pretty good job of nulling that. But if something was broken, I needed to lay off right away. You would think a broken bone would be instantly noticeable, but if it’s a small fracture of your wrist, say, you might not even know it until the next day when it swells to eight times its normal size, and bright lines of pain flow up your arm.

  “You got it this time,” Dashawn said. He was always super encouraging. It seemed as though I skated better with him around. When I came to the park on my own, I pretty much endlessly slammed and grumbled about scooter kids under my breath.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The scooter kids seemed to have tripled in number. Six of them were circling the manual pad in the middle of the park, chasing one another and laughing like crazed hyenas.

  “Natasha just dropped me a text. She’s going to be here in, like, ten minutes.”

  “Seriously? I thought she was coming closer to six o’clock,” I said.

  Dashawn held up his watch to show me it was already five thirty.

  “She says she’ll film this if you want. She was working on your video last night, and somehow you have eight good clips. You’re going to need at least twelve.”

  “I want fifteen,” I muttered.

  “Then hit that, bro.” He clapped my back and set his skateboard down. “I’ll see if I can get a good angle from over here so when Tash shows we can both shoot at the same time.”

  Sponsor Me videos are like calling cards to companies looking to throw products and money at new young skaters. We’d both placed in a contest in August, and a representative for a major company had asked for our videos. We told him we didn’t have full clips yet. He said we needed them fast in order to cash in on our contest results, or we’d soon be forgotten. This was all part of skateboarding. Who was in at any moment seemed, in many ways, purely due to luck. There were a lot of great skateboarders out there, so you had to show you had something different to offer. Something no one else had done or done in the same way.

  I wanted to skate clean. That was my thing. No wobbles, no flapping arms, always land on the bolts.

  Everything I did was smooth. If I landed, that is. I wasn’t going to put anything in the video if it wasn’t totally smooth and crisp. Dashawn cared less about how smooth he was, but he needed everything to be seriously technical. My video, I hoped, would look amazing on first view. Dashawn’s, on the other hand, would likely not seem like much to the untrained eye. But once you rewatched it, you would see that everything he was doing was incredibly difficult and precise. And he did it all with speed.

  I lined up the ledge again. Three scooter kids cut in around the end of it. Two took off while the third stood there and, I am serious here, picked his nose. I was about to yell at him when Dashawn said, “Hey, little dude, would you mind moving?” He pointed at me, and the kid removed his finger from his nose to look. “My friend’s trying to hit that ledge.” The kid pushed away immediately, then turned around to watch.

  “Go, Ry. Full out. Pop, flick, lean, rotate, pop.” He held his phone up before him and bent down for the angle. I pushed hard at the ledge, popped and flicked and somehow landed right on the edge of the ledge. I held the manual, feeling my rear trucks grinding along the metal, and then, just as I was rotating my shoulders to try the 180 off, I caught a bright-red blur to my right. I bailed, which was a good thing, because if I’d tried to pop off the ledge, I would have landed right on a scooter kid.

  “Goddammit!” I yelled. The kid pushed away, saying sorry over his shoulder. But he’d be right back. That was the problem—they always came back.

  Dashawn rolled over to me. “That was sick, man.”

  “Why are there so many scooters in this world? What are they even doing here? Why can’t they watch where they’re going or just…argh!”

  “Chill, man. How was he supposed to know you were coming off there?”

  “He would just have to look up now and then and…” The frustration finally boiled over, and I grabbed my board and threw it at a tree. The sound of wood on wood gave me a bit of satisfaction. But the rage built right back up again.

  “Bro, get a grip,” Dashawn said. “Natasha isn’t even here yet. We’ll get some guys to really clear the space out when she’s filming. No one will cut into you or the shot.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Try to relax. You know, keep calm and carry on and all that shit.”

  “Man, it doesn’t even matter. Have you ever seen a Sponsor Me video that features ten of fifteen clips in a skate park? Anyone can skate this place. That’s what it’s here for.”

  “Keep it smooth,” he said. “Keep it technical, and it doesn’t matter where you are.”

  “You lose this?”

  I turned to find Natasha behind me with my board in her hand. Natasha is about five seven with a giant mass of dark hair and deep-brown eyes. She got into skateboarding when she was about five, but then she busted her arm and was always afraid of reinjuring herself. She didn’t want that kind of injury to happen again, and instead of pushing herself to progress, she got into filming. For the past couple of years she’d been making really sick videos for YouTube and Instagram. A couple of her videos of me were featured on a roundup of clips on the Ride website once. The tricks I’d been doing were smooth and sweet, but honestly, it was her editing and the music she’d selected that really stepped the video up.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Are we shooting today?” she said. “We’re already losing light.”

  “There are too many kids here,” I said. “It’s impossible.”

  “I said we’d clear them out,” Dashawn said. “One sec.” He stepped away and yelled, “Ryan!”

  Our friend Ryan skated over to us.

  “Dude, can you get a couple other guys to block the traffic for Riley? He wants to film a clip on this ledge,” Dashawn said.

  Ryan looked around at the mass of swirling, shifting scooters. “I wouldn’t even bother,” he said.

  “Kickflip to 5-0 to 180 off,” Dashawn said. “It’s going to be sick.”

  Ryan looked at me. “It’s going to look like you’re messing around in a skate park. Is this for Instagram?”

  “No,” I said. “My Sponsor Me video.”

  “You have to do those in the real world,” he said. He pointed to where his bag was resting against a picnic table in the shade. “Let me show you something I found. I was going to keep it for myself, but if you promise to throw me some gear when you get sponsored, I’ll let you in on it.”

  Chapter Three

  Skaters see the world differently. Like, where some people might see a ledge to rest on or a set of stairs to take them from one level to another, a skater is going to see some
thing to grind, slide or jump. Therefore, what Ryan showed us was a pure slice of paradise.

  “Where is this?” Dashawn said.

  Ryan was flipping through the photos on his phone. They were all taken through what looked like a security fence. Caterpillars and diggers littered the space, and in the background a giant crane shot into the sky like a stairway to the clouds. Everything else was marble, steel, smooth concrete and pavement. There were angles, stairs from three to twenty steps. The building itself was nothing much, just another concrete box jammed in among newly planted lawns. Everything around it, though, was a skater’s paradise.

  “It’s out in the burbs. My aunt lives next door,” Ryan said.

  “It looks like they’re still working on it,” I said.

  “This was two weeks ago,” he replied, flicking to a picture of a smooth, uninterrupted slab of concrete that looked to be around twelve feet long with a perfect four-foot drop at the end. My mind was already racing with possibilities. “It’s done now.”

  “What do you mean by done?” Dashawn said.

  “I mean done. All this shit is gone. It’s just an empty building with all this around it.”

  “Are you sure?” Natasha said.

  “My aunt is going to start work there in two weeks. It’s some kind of high-tech place. Right now there’s nothing inside, so I doubt they’re even bothering with security. Not on-premise anyway.”

  “How far out is this?” I said. The ledge, upon closer inspection, had a metal coping along its edge. It was ridiculous. Like someone had designed a skate park around an office building for some reason. It was too perfect to not skate.

  “That’s the problem. It’s out in Westlake. There’s only one bus there.” Ryan stopped and looked up behind us, where three city buses were idling. “That one,” he said.

  “The 61?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “And you likely have about two minutes to get on that bus before it’s gone.”